For a special session on the presidential theme of the 2015 MLA, I am seeking papers that examine sites, theories, and representations of memory in African literatures and film. How have Africanists responded to memory studies?

Though African literary criticism is in many respects a comparatist discipline, Africanists rarely approach their work in explicitly comparatist terms. At the same time, comparative literary studies remains in a state of perpetual transformation, albeit one that still often takes European frameworks as a point of reference. What does it mean to imagine Africanist literary criticism as a comparatist discipline?